026 Erasing Thinking Murder sighs. He is sick of going through the same conversation over and over again. What’s the point of zooming in, scanning memories, freezing and replaying them if you can’t understand how to modify them? Khaled reads the thought and replies with a quote: He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort. Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. (Funes The Memorious, JL Borges). It would have sounded better had he not recited it with such affection. He was showing off and he was on a roll. Before Murder could say “great quote,” Khaled was already mansplaining it to him: Mansplain “See? That is exactly what Borges writes about: when you can remember everything, your thought process collapses, hence you can’t think. Your full power is engaged in remembering in such a rendering way, that you can’t even articulate your thoughts. That is the chore of our software: to erase thinking by giving the illusion of remembering everything, remember?” “Rugby Face is proving the software bollocks, for fuck sake, Khaled.” “He is the only AI who has come back to life, just the one. We had predicted that outcome and we should be ready to intervene.” “We don’t even know his whereabouts!” “As it turns out, I do.” “Do you? I bet you he is not in Saigon, is he?” “He is in Nepal.” “Oh my days, Khaled. How long were you planning to keep me in the dark?” “Just found out: he is in a little guesthouse close to KTM airport. You should know that he has just started a new connection with one of your previous selves, an old Roman with the exact same scar as yours. Rugby Face calls him The Oracle.” “The Oracle? For real?” Murder cracks every joint of his stiff rock anatomy. “There might have been some emotional development. He calls him Peanuts now.” “Is that right?” “Yes. Does it ring a bell? Anyone called you Peanuts before?” “My ex used to! Fuck! We need to rewire him ASAP! I’ll jump on the first plane to Kathmandu. And you do the same. I’ll bring Alex.” II. Now Here, Kathmandu, April 2025. “Many years ago I had a friend called Jim and I have not come across a saddest North American ever since. I have seen many hopeless. But as sad as Jim, not a single one.” (Jim, “The Insufferable Gaucho”, Roberto Bolaño). The Oracle, aka Peanuts, gives me a farewell book, Wade Davis’ Into the Silence, for my upcoming trip to Nepal, where he lived on and off between 1973 and 1978. It is the account of the late attempt to surmount Everest led by George Mallory, in 1924. I give Peanuts a copy of Bolaño’s The Insufferable Gaucho, in return. In its second short story, Jim, the saddest North American walks the streets of Mexico City mesmerized by a flame eater and oblivious to everything except his obsessive hunt for the most frugal, virtuous rhyme. Jimwalks and occasionally stops, and the beggar kids ask himwhat is the meaning of poetry. Jim looks at the clouds, then vomits, and then says. “Lexical, eloquence, the search for truth. Epiphany.” Durbbie “Harper, in Kathmandu, go to Durbar Square and visit the temple of the Lost. I used to live just above it. There were no tourists back then, just the odd mountaineer,” Peanuts says. He was one of the fewest expats in the 70s, and found his way to sell magic carpets filled with hash. “Back then, you could get an unbelievable range of the brown stuff in every street market. It was lined up in heaps and you could buy as much as you wanted. Eventually, at the airport, you had to pay a five per cent tax for each gram you took away, can you believe it?” When auld timers tell you about the good old days, they have a massive offline point.
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